When Eyyafyatlayokudl erupted I was on the way to Budapest, Hungary. I wasn't particularly following the news of the eruption because it didn't matter that much to me. It was a rainy morning in Budapest and the lovely city looked less than occupied. Of all the things, the news of the volcano disrupting air traffic completely escaped me.
But the next day afternoon, when I had reached Bratislava in Slovakia it hit me. There were no planes in the air and no trains where you could get a seat. If you had to be stranded in some place Europe, Bratislava is not the best place. But in a pinch like this, for an escape route, it is a better place than say Vienna or Prague. Because fewer people get stranded in Bratislava.
I ran from the train station to the bus station and back. Bratislava bus station is a communist-era concrete monstrosity that at once is an eye-sore and a deeply unhelpful burocratic prison. Having run from counter to counter, the best answer I could get was that the earliest I could get out of Bratislava was by bus was TWO days from the day.
TWO days!
I went back to the hotel and tried to do something over the web. Slovakian bus lines do not accept international credit cards. I was about to pull the stunt John Cleese did when it occured to me that the best bet in these situations is to revisit the site of escape and stay put until the end of the scene. Either the hero lives or dies...
And I was the hero of my own life. So off I went back to the bus station armed with a ticket for a bus that would leave two days hence.
At 5:00 PM, right before the bus was about to leave, with some additional pursuation in the form of some extra Euros, a seat magically appeared. It was a bus coming from Kraków, Poland. I sat next to a woman infected with a chronic cough. Thus began a twenty-two hour journey by bus through Eastern Europe and Austria.
Unwashed, unslept and unshaven I finally rolled back into town just happy to be back. The only memory of the trip was a rest stop in the middle of nowhere in Austria where the waiters and waitresses in touristy-traditional garb poured hot soup on the bowls concentration camp-style.
Thanks Eyyafyatlayokudl.
